showing Atomic Heart in bright trailers, gameplay demos and numerous screenshots, the studio Mundfish diligently tried to convey to the potential audience the key essence of her project in the most accessible way.
Throwing away everything superfluous, Atomic Heart is positioned as a dynamic adventure game regarding evil robots in the aesthetics of Soviet retrofuturism.
Having got acquainted with it personally at the last closed presentation in Moscow, organized with the support of VK Play, the above characteristics can be fully confirmed. But in full regarding Atomic Heart, she will tell you almost nothing – the game is much more complex than it seems from the outside.
There are really a lot of evil robots in Atomic Heart, they can be beaten with an ax, shot from a weapon, disassembled for parts and stunned with electricity, along the way making a lot of other curious manipulations. Of course, once morest the backdrop of Soviet retrofuturism. Caricatured and cartoonish, but from that and so expressive.
Taking various manifestations of the Soviet Empire style as a basis, the artists from Mundfish did not restrain their imagination and dispersed in full. Majestic buildings stretch with sharp spiers to the sky, wide marble columns remind you of your insignificance, an expressive monument grasps the farthest corners of the horizon with a glance, and the granite cladding of the interiors solemnly and stately shines with pleasant halftones.
Even household items, such as the Soyuzpechat kiosks, the designers managed to ennoble with a mass of insignificant, but touching details. Almost all external paraphernalia deserves the same praise – the design of enemies, weapons, scenery. Atomic Heart is a colorful style game that hits fountains from any angle.
The preview build presented by the developers offered several sections at once from different parts of the game world. First, we had to get acquainted with the opening scenes of the game – a passive trip through the virtual museum of an ideal utopia, where scientific and technological progress catapults Soviet society towards a brighter future.
Within the framework of the setting, people live in prosperity and are in peace of mind – mechanical assistants are ready to take on almost any hard work and provide any service.
It is this moment that will probably cause direct analogies with the first hours for most BioShock Infinite – there is beauty and grace around, the all-encompassing presence of which violates only the sarcastic tone of the protagonist.
Further, out of a clear context, the preview switches to the expected rich gameplay episode. Funny robots are tired of being funny, they want blood and destruction, which is why the protagonist, former military man Sergei Nechaev, has to go to study one of the underground complexes of Object 3826.
Since Nechaev now has a sharp ax in his hands, and cars no longer serve delicious soda in faceted glasses, here Atomic Heart begins to introduce its mechanical insides and pace: resources are limited, the hero is low-mobile and weak, mistakes are quickly punished.
Surprise. It turns out that behind the screen of a peppy tactile shooter, Atomic Heart has been hiding its other features all this time. So, the first full-fledged fight with a simple robot Vovka turns into almost a full-fledged boss fight – the enemy makes a lot of quick and painful attacks, and the window for a counterattack with an ax is very small. You have to dodge, finding the opportunity to make a couple of retaliatory strikes (the developers admitted that they love Bloodborne). There is also a shotgun in the arsenal, but there is almost no ammunition for it – it is better to leave the firearm for later. You involuntarily recall the classic moods Resident Evil – even a safe save room with a nice theme song is close by.
To not be so scary, you can walk through the scattered rooms. There, in drawers and boxes, resources are hidden – health-restoring modules and other useful things. The process of “looting” itself is simplified and rather comical – the magic glove on Nechaev’s hand literally sucks all the treasures into itself, saving time due to the lack of hunting for interactive zones of objects.
Not having time to recover from the nightmare of underground corridors, where a single kick in the stomach from an insane automaton can send the hero to the nearest checkpoints, the test build of Atomic Heart relentlessly moves on.
The corridors are over. Instead of them – fields, roads, trees. Robots hide in the fields, robots run along the roads, robots also suddenly fall from the trees. There is no time to swing an ax anymore, you need to shoot – a lot and quickly. The melody has changed, and with it the overall perception of the game. You simply don’t have time to remember the danger and the surroundings, since Vovchik is no longer a threat, now the threat is Nechaev himself. An assault rifle cuts off a “bee” hovering overhead in one burst, a gauntlet throws advancing turrets into the air, and a salvo of a grenade launcher smashes enemies that rushed to the rescue.
However, victory is still far away. Need to relocate. There is an abandoned car on the road – it is on the move and can take you far, far away. The main thing is to open the map and choose a route. Here Atomic Heart unexpectedly reminds of Far Cry. The open hub available for study boasts an impressive size, where there is something interesting at different points.
But there is no time to go in search of something interesting – the game session was limited to only an hour and a half. But there is a large level further on, focusing mainly on puzzles tied to the environment – yes, like in some Portal. Atomic Heart also has giant bosses with their own arenas and cyclic attack patterns – also not quite a typical phenomenon for the genre.
The randomness of the Atomic Heart experience might easily be explained by the limitations and conventions of the preview build. But in fact, the game itself is really not shy regarding changing masks at lightning speed – different episodes focus on completely different things, which greatly affects the perception.
The swaying focus was even reflected in the narrative elements. Externally, the debut development of Mundfish diligently depicts a nightmarish tale, where the bright and good turns into evil and scary. Aesthetically, the project draws a very romanticized and authentic picture of an unprecedented past – home and dear.
But here some clumsy westernized artistic clichés slip through. Nechaev, like the canonical hero of a traditional mid-budget action movie, casually comments on what is happening, swears vulgarly and does not want to waste time on nonsense that distracts him from the mission. Grandmother Zina throws her faithful cane away and pulls out a large grenade launcher from the box, vulgarly swears and fires a volley at the approaching enemy.
The mood of such scenes and dialogues is extremely understandable – Atomic Heart creates around itself an aura of mischievous and comical hooliganism, but within the framework of such a pronounced setting, the plot presentation causes a sharp dissonance. As if the image of a sweet grandmother was not composed of thousands and thousands of old women spending their old age on benches at the entrance, but was written by some John Doe from Colorado.
The impressions from the narrative fragments are also spurred on by a somewhat strange Russian voice acting – the actors are recognizable and clearly trying, but the sound mixing in the preview version left much to be desired. The voices are casually integrated into the game and sound like a studio recording rather than a natural part of the game world. But Atomic Heart is still in the active stage of production, and some technical issues, including the process of scoring scenes, may be far from complete.
In order not to inflate the material even more, some details and features of Atomic Heart were not mentioned.
For example, the game has a large and complex role-playing system – you can improve both the hero himself, supplementing his abilities with new tricks, and a wide arsenal of weapons. Guns are not only more powerful and more efficient, but also change in appearance. The developers are making a serious bet on pumping in general – representatives of Mundfish noted that some difficult sections of Atomic Heart can be greatly facilitated by spending time on effective character development. The music in the game is often strictly diegetic – fervent Soviet songs are heard from the speakers hung on the towers.
In open hub zones, Atomic Heart offers a whole complex system of hide-and-seek and collision with cars. Being detected by enemies or special cameras, you have the opportunity to both worsen your situation by unleashing the wrath of the local defense system on yourself, and counterattack in time by stunning the computer mind, which will once more allow you to freely and without threats to study the level.
The mechanics described above are something the Mundfish team is particularly proud of. It was important for the developers to endow the virtual world with internal logic and consistency, so even basic, strictly gameplay tools, such as the process of spawning opponents, are integrated into the prescribed setting.
Science takes courage. As a game regarding the wonders of science, Atomic Heart is not shy regarding declaring its bravery. Under the lid of one game, a whole bunch of genre styles and trends has developed. At first glance, almost all of them are made at a competent level, but we will see in February how well the mosaic will form into the big picture, and whether it will have enough shades to form its own gameplay identity.
Atomic Heart releases February 21, 2023.
Read also: Grandmother, robots and the Soviet Union: New 4K screenshots of the shooter Atomic Heart.
